


Interrogatives?—Season 7

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Humor, Marriage, Married Couple, Married Life, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-28 01:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 17,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30132222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: So. Yeah. I completely broke up with the show and then . . . pandemic? And the worst semester of my life? And general world on fire? In any case, I watched through the series again and did a story per episode, just as I did with Dialogic, and then with Object Lessons. So each chapter is an independent, episode-based story. It will take me a while to get these posted, but there are another 151 stories and I'll divvy them up by season. Oh, I suppose this is obvious, but each story is prompted by a question posed in the episode.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7





	1. Blackguard—Driven (7 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is on the lookout for a villain. This is her constant after that one faltering moment—it was his clothes, it was his movements, his body. She falters for an instant, but Martha sets her to rights. Alexis does. And she is on the lookout for a villain. 

> _“Do you want me to run it again?”  
>  — Tory Ellis, Driven (7x 01)_

* * *

She is on the lookout for a villain. This is her constant after that one faltering moment—i _t was his clothes, it was his movements, his body._ She falters for an instant, but Martha sets her to rights. Alexis does. And she is on the lookout for a villain. 

She finds one occasionally. In the most inconvenient, inappropriate places, she finds herself a villain. Agent Connors is the first to fit the bill. He is blasé from the start. He dismisses as ridiculous the not at all ridiculous idea that someone might kidnap a millionaire for ransom. He all but implies this is her fault—that it’s some villain of her own she ought to be looking for. He is without tact or finesse or compassion. He is _confrontational_ , and she has a theory—a crazed theory born of days hunting flat out—that Connors is her actual, literal villain.

She recovers from it. She, thankfully, keeps it shut in her heart of hearts and someone sees the signs. Lanie or Ryan. Esposito or even Gates. Someone sees the signs and Martha comes to collect her in the middle of the night at the precinct. Martha brings her home to the loft. She turns her by the shoulders and orders her to strip off the work clothes she’s been wearing for who knows how many days. She orders her to lie down on the couch. She tucks her in and keeps watch in the chair nearby until Kates sleeps. She has no choice but to sleep, and when she wakes, she realizes her Connors theory is seriously crazed. She realizes she needs a new villain. 

She works her way outward from Vinny Cardano. Vinny himself, she is loath to admit, is a nonstarter, but he has enemies. He has rivals who might have been privy to the Valpolicella and mistaken the fence-mending meeting for something it wasn’t. But these are weak candidates, weak motives. She has her sites set on someone so much more likely. 

She spends time on Jackson Hunt—on Anderson Cross or whoever he is. She spends so much time on the man who isn’t his father, who used him as bait once, so why not again? She sits on the floor in the archives with Ted Rollins’ case spread out around her. It’s another dark secret for her heart of hearts, because the world thinks that Tony Blaine is still at large—that it’s a complete mystery how the shadowy figure from Alexis’s kidnapping came to play some unknown role in the murder of a twenty-one-year-old hacker. 

It’s another dark secret for her heart of hearts because he’d made the decision to tell Lanie and the boys that it was his father who’d orchestrated his high-risk rescue of Alexis and their escape from the clutches of a Russian oligarch. He’d shared that with their immediate family, but she’s alone in having a face to put to that undeserved title. 

She’s alone but for Martha, who stands silently by as she smashes a rocks glass against the brick wall of his office, because Hunt or Cross or _whoever_ he is is such a promising villain and she has nothing on him—he is fire walled to hell and back, because he is or was and maybe is again a CIA asset. Martha stands silently by, waiting, until the rage rushes out of her all at once and Kate is sobbing for maybe the first time since she fell to her knees in front of the roaring flames as they consumed his car at the bottom of that embankment. 

Martha gets her another rocks glass with a generous pour of scotch. She listens as Kate runs down all of the ways that it could be him—that Cross could be the villain by design, by stupid accident, because even Tony Blaine believed Castle was an asset. Even Blaine believed that he was a confederate of Cross’s, because who would use their son like that?

 _Who would do that?_ she spits, and Martha silently contemplates the bottom of her own rocks glass. She contemplates the choices that gave her only son to her and the fact that they are the same choices that might now have taken him away. Martha silently contemplates and Kate sees that she is the villain. She blurts out an apology. She stammers that she didn’t mean, she doesn’t think, that it’s not the case …

But Martha waves an imperious hand. She makes a grim, whistling-in-the-graveyard kind of joke about the sins everyone has to live with, the licks they have to take when the past comes calling. She kisses Kate on the forehead and leaves her to it with rocks glass in hand. She tells her to keep on, to find the answer. Kate lifts her chin and with more certainty than she feels, says she will.

She sleeps not long after. She leaves the scotch mostly untouched and sleeps. She wakes fresh the following morning and the day comes to her like it has since the day she was supposed to be come his wife: She remembers that she is not his wife. That he is gone, the she has, thus far, failed him. She tells herself today is the day she will _not_ fail him. She reminds herself she’s on the lookout for a villain. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Maybe the villain has a mustache. That would be a thing, unlike this. 


	2. Tertian—Montreal (7 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are two explanations for the amount of time she has been putting in at the precinct. Each on is worse than the last. 

> _“You really think the answer’s inside?”  
>  — Alexis Castle, Montreal (7 x 02)_

* * *

There are two explanations for the amount of time she has been putting in at the precinct. Each on is worse than the last. 

Explanation number one is she’s paying some kind of professional penance, and he’s the root cause. Less than a year back from her too-brief stint in the Attorney General’s office, Detective Kate Beckett had been left at the altar by her obviously unreliable fiancé. The baseline rumor mill on that would have been bad enough, but she’d looked for him. Within hours of the accident, she’d had evidence of his complicity and _still_ she’d spent months looking for him. 

And even leaving aside the rumor mill and what must have been a steady stream of pitying, then contemptuous looks, he knows she used every single tool and resource at her disposal. He knows that, heedless of what had to have seemed painfully obvious, she called in every favor available to her, and she got behind on her actual work. She must have gotten _so_ behind even with the boys covering for her and picking up the slack, even with Gates being uncharacteristically generous in turning a blind eye to where she was directing her focus and her time. 

So that’s explanation number one: She’s on the brink of career suicide, and she has him to thank for that. She is at the precinct until all hours almost every night. She sneaks in for a few hours each weekend day, and it must be because she’s trying to staunch the bleeding and hang on to the job she loves. 

So, that’s bad. It’s really bad, but it’s got nothing on explanation number two: She can’t bear to be around him. 

It’s an idea as seductive as it is devastating. It makes _sense._ That’s the seductive part. He doesn’t know how she can even look at him without seeing his watch hanging from a tent strap, or the pixelated image capture of his stupid, faux-furtive face as he tosses a paper bag filled with their honeymoon money into a dumpster. Why _wouldn’t_ she stay glued to her desk until the rumor mill ramps up again and everyone’s talking about their inevitable implosion. Why wouldn’t that be the only thing that could drive her reluctant back to the loft? 

There is a part of him that sees the inexorable logic of that—a part of him that thinks that no matter what took him away, kept him away, returned him under such punishing circumstances, he deserves the shunning. But the rest of him is devastated by the fact that even now, after everything they have been through, she doesn’t believe in him. Even with a fake Jenkins in the mix and the obvious implication that the tent and the watch and all of that, at least, was a set up, the little faith she has in him is not enough to bring her home at a decent hour. 

He is suffering over it. He is lonely and disoriented and out of sync with the world. He is out of sync with his entire life. He is suffering. 

He needn’t be, it turns out. He needn’t have been suffering.

There’s a third explanation, but it takes Montreal to pry it out of her. It takes Montreal times two, and a date a month from now for him to open his mouth and ask. 

“Will you let me make you dinner tomorrow night?” He asks in a rush. She’s burrowed against his side, closer than it feels like they’ve been since he’s been home, and he’s afraid she’s already nodding off. He’s afraid he’ll chicken out. “Early-ish, maybe?” 

“Will I _let_ you?” She laughs. It’s soft and sleepy and delightful. “I might demand it.” 

“Demand away.” He tries to laugh, too, but he’s rusty at it. It’s not exactly delightful. “But early-ish. And can I make you dinner the next night?” 

“The next night?” She shifts to haul herself up on an elbow, to peer down on him. “Early-ish?” 

“Yeah,” he nods. “Early-ish. And the night after that—“ 

She studies him a moment, and even in the enveloping dark, he thinks he sees realization on her face. “Castle,” she says slowly, “ I can come home early-ish every night.” Her brown crinkles. “Almost every night, if I’m not … crowding things.” 

“Crowding?” He scoffs loudly enough that she stops his mouth with one hand. He downshifts. “What do you mean, ‘crowding’?” 

“I mean …” her voice grows small and vulnerable. “Alexis and Martha lost you, too. And I don’t want to—“ 

He stops _her_ mouth this time. He kisses her and pulls her to him. There’s a third explanation. 

“Never, Kate.” He kisses her forehead and each softly closed eyelid, gently as he can. “You could never.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: There’s a look that Beckett has on her face when Mrs. Williger talks about her husband working late. That’s a thing. This is not. 


	3. Au naturel—Clear and Present Danger (7 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This is a terrible idea.” She clatters her indestructible diner coffee cup against the indestructible diner saucer and scowls, for all the good that does her.

> _“What kind of business is this, exactly?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Clear and Present Danger (7 x03)_

* * *

“This is a terrible idea.” She clatters her indestructible diner coffee cup against the indestructible diner saucer and scowls, for all the good that does her. 

“I know, right?” He takes another slug of the coffee, as if he needs the caffeine bump. His knees are jogging beneath the table. He’s shredded enough napkins to house a dozen happy hamsters. He’s grinning and twisting toward the window to look up and down the street. “It’s gonna be so great.” 

It’s _not_ going to be great. It’s going to be _terrible,_ as previously mentioned, but there is absolutely no point in arguing this with him, when he has already regressed deep into his early sugar-rush days. So she contents herself with silent grumbling. She occupies herself by clamping down on the inexplicable, giddy excitement she seems to be feeling even though this is a _terrible_ idea. 

The bell above the diner’s door clangs. Magnet-like, it whips his attention toward the entrance. He bounces up from his side of the booth. The size of his grin grows exponentially as waves his arms as though they’re in some cavernous mess hall instead of some hole-in-the-wall place that might seat thirty people on a lively night. It is not a lively night, and his voice is loud—far too loud—when he calls out, “Espo! Lanie! Here!” 

He shoves in next to her, leaving the other side of the booth for the two of them to slide in together. Lanie makes eye contact with her. She has her best deadpan-verging-on-pissed-off face on, though there’s something dancing just beneath the surface. It’s something Kate thinks she might recognize as she once again presses against that strange, giddy whatever that keeps trying to bubble up in her. 

Lanie gives the slightest of nods. She gets it. Whatever it is, Lanie gets it, though she’s about as likely as Kate to let it show. Instead, she folds her hands on the table in front of her. She holds for a second until Castle and Esposito get the hint and stop their school-girl chatter. “This?” She gestures from Castle to Esposito and back again. “This is a terrible idea.” 

“Do you hear that, Castle?” She turns toward him all wide-eyed and innocent. “Lanie thinks this is a terrible idea.” 

“It’s audience participation night ladies!” Esposito, who appears to be running on something even more dangerous than the caffeine fueling Castle, reaches across the table for a fist-bump from his co-conspirator. “And you two, talking how it’s gonna be terrible!” 

“Audience _what_ now?” Lanie scans the table and Kate thinks it’s probably for the best that the waitress has already taken away the silverware. Probably.

“Oooh, speaking of—” Castle, who is running on caffeine and enthusiasm for this stupid, terrible scheme he and Esposito have cooked up, looks at his watch. “We should go. Big cattle call, I’ll bet.” 

“Yeah, yeah, let’s move.” Esposito slides out of the booth. He reaches out a hand to Lanie and, still oblivious, utterly misses how pointedly she ignores it as she brushes by him.

Out on the street, the two of them fall into step as the boys rush on ahead. They alternate between whispers and peals of laughter. Kate half wonders if, right there on the street, they might break into spontaneous mani-pedis and crank calls to the boys they both have a crush on. 

“This is some _nonsense,_ ” Lanie says, breaking a silence that Kate only belatedly realizes has fallen.She feels a guilty, awkward blush rising in her cheeks. 

“Stupid.” she says, too heartily. She’s overcompensating. “Those two and their stupid schemes.”

Lanie must hear it—she must hear the mix of giddy nerves and exasperation at war inside her. She sizes Kate up out of the corner of her eye. “Still,” she says cautiously. “The ‘those two’ part. That’s a good thing.” 

“It is.” She feels relief flooding through her as Lanie names it. She calls out the little geyser of concern and excitement and nerves that Kate has been pressing down on since the two knuckleheads just turning the corner ahead of them had hatched up this stupid, terrible plan. “Those two.” 

She and Lanie turn the corner together. The club’s gaudy sign comes into sight, with its chiseled men arranged like a skyline, surrounded by neon and chaser lights. _Those two_ —those terrible two—are easy to pick out from the sea of bachelorettes and soccer moms out for the night in the city. They’ve rushed to the front of the queue, launching a hundred high-pitched, already-slightly-drunken protests as they crowd around a comparatively small figure in a tight navy t-shirt with Security emblazoned across it, front and back. 

“Officer—“ Castle turns to Esposito. “Is that the right term? Do we call him officer?” 

“Seems proper.” Esposito gives a sober nod. “Respectful.” 

Ryan’s cheeks are fire engine red as he stares doggedly past the two of them, making no reply whatsoever. His gaze lands on Kate, on Lanie, and for just a moment, he thinks he’s saved. But the two of them tug at each other. They stumble forward, giddy about this terrible, terrible plan. 

“Officer,” Kate coos. “Can’t you help us?” 

“Please, Officer.” Lanie jumps in. “It’s audience participation night, and we’re looking for some _good_ seats.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ryan looking buff in his club security t-shirt is most definitely a thing. But this is not a thing. This is a terrible idea. And stupid. 


	4. Toil and Trouble—Child's Play (7 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Operation Play is an unqualified success. He and Alexis scandalize—and most likely irritate—the neighbors and their guests by zipping down the hallway, zipping out of the elevator and through the lobby. They don’t zip through the revolving door, but he swears that’s only because Eduardo, having secured a cab for a scandalized—and possibly irritated—neighbor, steps on the sensor to open the automatic door with absolutely perfect timing. 

> _“Should I be worried?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, Child’s Play (7 x 04)_

* * *

Operation Play is an unqualified success. He and Alexis scandalize—and most likely irritate—the neighbors and their guests by zipping down the hallway, zipping out of the elevator and through the lobby. They _don’t_ zip through the revolving door, but he swears that’s only because Eduardo, having secured a cab for a scandalized—and possibly irritated—neighbor, steps on the sensor to open the automatic door with absolutely perfect timing. 

“I think we would have made it,” he says as they settle on to a bench on Petrosino Square with their slices of perfectly gooey pizza. “The revolving door. It could be our signature move—The Castle. You know the judges love a high-difficulty move.” 

“Not when ‘The Castle’ lands you in traction.” Alexis rolls her eyes and tries, without success, to suppress a grin. “And don’t you think you’ve spent enough time in the hospital already this year?” 

It’s as if the city falls quiet when she says it. The roar of cars and conversation is swallowed whole. Planes hang quiet in the sky. Two benches over a man is scattering stale bread, and the second she says it, the high-pitched tweets of birds going crazy for it cut off absolutely. That’s what it’s like, and maybe the success here is not quite unqualified. 

Except the record-scratch, turn-to-the-camera moment gets them talking. She opens up, and he opens up. They talk about fear, about control and the illusion of it. About risks that are foolish and risks that are worth it. It gets them talking about risks that are foolish, but worth taking anyway. It gets them actually talking in a way they haven’t quite managed—not really—since she first left to move in with Pi. It’s not that they haven’t long since made up over that, but they have been out of step, off-kilter, and this feels like actual peace. 

They zip home on their scooters. They scandalize—and absolutely irritate—pedestrians and cabbies and drivers and cyclists. They do _not_ attempt the revolving door, though he still thinks they could have made it. 

Alexis folds her razor scooter when they get home. She pointedly folds _his_ razor scooter and tucks them into the front closet. She wraps her arms around him when she’s done. 

“Thanks, Dad,” she whispers against his shoulder. “This is just what I needed.” 

“Operation Play cannot fail.” He puffs up his chest.

“You’re right about that.” She pulls back. She’s making up her mind to say something. “I think … I think I’m going to continue the mission.” She straightens her shoulders. “I’ve been … kind of a homebody and some of my friends have been giving me grief—“ 

“Call them.” He turns her by the shoulders and aims her toward the stairs. He plays it up to disguise the fact that he’s a little sad their play date is coming to an end. “That’s an order direct from Operation Play HQ.” 

She digs in her heels and resists. She’s only half kidding. He can feel the tension in her body coiling up again. "I don’t have to go out to _tonight._ I can—" 

His phone dings, cutting off her protest. He holds it up, flashing the text from Beckett giving her post-precinct ETA. “Please. It’s not like I don’t have _other_ playdates!” 

He waggles his eyebrows with the express intention of grossing her out, of shepherding her back to a decidedly playful mood, but it’s ineffective, for once. Instead, she fixes him with a curious look, earnest and searching. 

“I think a playdate would be good.” There’s more she wants to say, but she stops herself. She chooses her words carefully, economically. “Maybe Beck— _Kate_ —needs a little Operation Play time.” 

She turns and hurries up the stairs, leaving him to watch her go as he contemplate the suggestion. He thinks of Kate and the things they have clawed back from those awful two months—from the awful mystery of what he could have done and what he _did_ do. He thinks of her here and on the job, the way she runs interference for him, fills In the gaps, stands fiercely ready to defend him against cynical views on the bits and pieces of the story he knows. 

He thinks of Operation Play and a frank restorative conversation on a bench along the edge of a brick square. He thinks of Kate and makes a plan. 

He absently lifts his cheek for Alexis to kiss as she heads out with an overnight bag slung over her shoulder. He’s on the phone. He’s arranging things. He is setting the stage, and he’s only just ready under the wire. He’s still adjusting the tiara on his head and tugging to make sure his wings sit right when he hears her key in the door. 

Her jaw drops when she sees it—a high tea spread set out on the coffee table, around which he’s arranged every cushion and throw pillow and bolster they own. She is agog—too startled almost to realize that he’s approaching her with arms outstretched—with a tiara in one hand and a pair of wings in the other. 

“Good evening, Detective,” he says with a bow. He holds out the tiara and wings. “I was hoping that this might be one of those ‘sometimeses’ that you like to play princess.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ice palace things, which is to say: NO THINGS.


	5. Analog—Meme is Murder (7 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s no such thing as an off-hand comment in the presence of Richard Castle, the human vacuum for predilections, preferences, and peccadilloes, for faux pas and foibles. There is probably no one alive who knows this better than she, yet she makes the rookie mistake of saying she’d like to unplug. 

> _“Look, I’ll make it simple for you, okay?”  
>  — Tatiana Fisher, Meme is Murder (7 x 05)_

* * *

There’s no such thing as an off-hand comment in the presence of Richard Castle, the human vacuum for predilections, preferences, and peccadilloes, for faux pas and foibles. There is probably no one alive who knows this better than she, yet she makes the rookie mistake of saying she’d like to unplug. 

She’s surprised he remembers it, given the subsequent discovery of his awkward viral video debut. She shouldn’t be surprised, even though he is traumatized by the sight of his head as a bouncing ball. He remembers everything—except for the two months he doesn’t remember at all—and that’s a little bit what this is about, she thinks. He’s prone to leap goofily on to her off-hand comments at any given moment, but she thinks this probably isn’t just any given moment. 

His first _Your-Off-Hand-Comment-Is-My-Command_ salvo comes that very night as she’s clambering into bed. He’s already there, flat on his back, not reading, not continuing to refresh the Black Pawn website to see how many times his bouncing head has now been viewed and in how many countries. 

His deviation from pattern alone should have the hair on the back of her neck raising, but she’s tired. She’s distracted. So she clambers into bed. She rolls toward the night stand to pull the chain on her bedside lamp. 

“G’night, Castle,” she murmurs. Her eyelids are already heavy. When she lands on her back and turns her face up, expecting his customary kiss, she’s instead greeted with flat white card stock. 

There’s a scrolled border sketched hastily around the edges in what looks like sharpie. In the center are letters dripping with flourishes instead of his usual neat caps—Goodnight, My Dearest Love. He holds that card up for a beat, then tosses it aside. The one behind it reads: Morning cannot come too soon. He tosses _that_ aside to reveal the next three in rapid succession—Goodnight, Goodnight, Goodnight. 

She snatches the last Goodnight from his hands. She laughs uproariously as she launches herself at him. It’s possible she giggles, because the gag is stupid—it’s so _very_ stupid—but she can’t stop laughing. She can’t help but launch herself at him, and the movie that follows is anything but silent. 

He goes after her phone next. He changes the wallpaper on it, so it features an old-school badge rather than the current department logo. But worst—much worse—he switches her ring tone to that awful thing that sounds like an old school phone with a wired handset and actual bells. She discovers _that_ in the middle of an interview and she swears to herself there’ll be revenge for that. She’s dead set on it, but when she gets back to there desk, there’s a thick white envelope with her name in familiar calligraphy across it. 

There’s an old-school love note inside. It’s a little bawdy and a lot sentimental. It’s poetry drafted in careful ink drawn up out of an actual inkwell into one of his dozen fancy fountain pens, and it ends with a formal invitation—her place, pretty early in the evening. _Don’t be late!_ he admonishes, though he adds _Please,_ in parentheses. 

She isn’t late. She tells herself the she’s still plotting her revenge, but the note—the promise of a date—have softened her up. Any residual resistance is shot all to hell when it turns out that the date is a meal absolutely from scratch, an apartment filled with candlelight, and episode after episode of _Temptation Lane,_ courtesy of the treasured VHS tapes she hasn’t had.a player for in ages. But he’s found one, of course, and he is addicted to the show within minutes, despite his abiding distaste for Lance Hastings.

It goes on from there. He texts her by taking photos of typewritten messages—because of course the ancient thing in his office actually _works_. She hears through the grapevine that he is absolutely crushed to learn that Western Union stopped sending telegrams nearly a decade ago, and no amount of money can convince them to send just one more. 

At what must be no small effort, he dismantles the fancy coffeemaker at the loft and bundles it off to parts unknown. When she cries out in protest at the loss of its life-saving auto-brew function, he puffs out his chest and says, “Baby, I’ll be your auto brew.” She laughs at him for that. She launches herself at him. 

And it’s ludicrous, but he is. He sets an alarm that somehow doesn’t wake her for the, and he brews something new and pretty fantastic in a banged up stovetop percolator. It’s the third day of that—she’s lost count of what day it is overall since she made her off-hand common—when she stops him. He’s deposited her coffee on the nightstand and he’s heading back toward the kitchen, possibly to tend to the chickens he might have installed there in the name of of all things unplugged. She grabs his wrist, though. She pulls him back down on to the edge of the bed. 

“Enough,” she says. She gestures toward the coffee. “Castle it’s enough. You don’t have to—“ She chews her lip. “You don’t have anything to make up to me, Castle.” 

“Kate.” His voice is low. He’s smiling, mostly, but his voice is low. “I do, but that’s not …” He flips the hold she has on her wrist. He turns her hand palm up and traces the delicate lines there. “It was at first. Because I do.” He lifts her palm to kiss it, as though that can quiet her. It _does_ quiet her, the sincerity of it. “I do have so much to make up to you. But now, all this …” He traces a heart on the heel of her hand. He traces her initials, plus his and shoots an arrow through it. “I just like spending time on you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Telegrams are not a thing anymore. Isn’t that a bummer? Much like this not thing. 


	6. Tactical—Time of Our Live (7 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You had a plan?” She sounds skeptical. Even with her face mushed into the pillow and her breath still coming in quick, exhausted little pants, Detective Mrs. Beckett Castle sounds skeptical. 

> _“I had all these plans, you know?”  
>  — Alexis Castle, Time of Our Lives (7 x 06)_

* * *

“You had a plan?” She sounds skeptical. Even with her face mushed into the pillow and her breath still coming in quick, exhausted little pants, Detective Mrs. Beckett Castle sounds _skeptical_. 

“I had _many_ plans.” He sounds confident. Even though each word has a caesura to keep it company. Even though the weak sound of his voice is practically inaudible beneath the pounding of his heart, Mr. Not Detective Castle Beckett sounds confident. “My back-up plans had back-up plans.” He demonstrates how confident he is by heaving himself from his back to his side so that he can stare, nose-to-nose, right into her eyes. “I was working my way back to you, babe.” 

“And how many of these back-up plans involved variations of holding on to the artifact and wishing really hard?” She, not to be outdone, works her way up on to her forearms. She readjusts her skepticism array so that it hits him full force. “Holding the artifact and wishing really hard while rubbing your tummy and patting your head, maybe?” She screws up her face like she’s thinking about it. “No, that thing’s heavy. You’d have knocked yourself out _again_.” 

_Again._ As if he had been the one to knock himself out the first time. The accusation is wicked enough that he makes a grab for her, but she must be soaking up the candlelight to recharge her devilish powers. She somehow manages to duck away. She somehow manages to rise all the way to her knees, and in the process, distract him with a rather spectacular view. 

“Maybe it was holding the artifact, wishing really hard, and doing the Macarena?” She demonstrates, as well as anyone can demonstrate the Ancient Artifact Macarena from their knees while teetering on the edge of a king-sized bed. And if one is Detective Mrs. Beckett Castle, that’s pretty damned well. 

But devilish powers or not, spectacular view plus disturbingly sexy upper-body Macarena or not, the game is afoot and Mr. Not Detective Castle Beckett is honor-bound to respond, and respond he does. Finding his own devilish-power reserves, he pushes himself up and snatches her around her undulating waist and flips her to her back. He slings one thigh over hers and pins her upper body to the mattress with one heavy hand. 

“Mrs. Castle,” he purrs right against the spot that drives her crazy, the one just below her ear. “You know I’m an Electric Slide man.” 

She laughs uncontrollably even as her exhausted body responds to his touch, to the weight of him on top of her. He laughs uncontrollably even as he works his way with lips and tongue and teeth and inquisitive fingers over every inch of her. They both laugh uncontrollably as they wear one another out, for good this time. Although _for good_ , of course, is what they said last time. 

But she’s nodding off, this time, is Detective Mrs. Beckett Castle. Her devilish powers may have dropped too low for even the candlelight to be effective. She is not grilling him on his parallel universe escape strategies—at least not in anything anyone would recognize as coherent sentences. She’s nodding off, and he’s not far behind. 

HIs mind is still just a little busy, and even though he feels right and satisfied in every part of himself, body and soul, the thought of sleep is still just the tiniest bit daunting. He knows this is right—getting married right here, right now is the _rightest_ thing in the world even if it’s also a homonymic, tautological nightmare for a writer. He knows this is what his unconscious mind was trying to prod him toward, and the uninterrupted joy she has been exuding—that she is still exuding even as she nods off—tells him that just this once, his unconscious mind might have had a point. 

But just in case, he wants to work through his escape plans one more time before he follows her into blissful, exhausted sleep. He just wants to be absolutely sure, in case of unconsciousness-induced shenanigans, he has a clear path to follow back to her—back to this perfect world. 

He laughs to himself thinking about the artifact, the Macarena, and the Electric Slide. An unfortunate number of the plans he’d managed to generate in his two days through the lookingglass _were_ artifact-based. He wasn’t rolling in options there, though. He thinks, with a painful hitch in his breath, about the seeming impossibility of getting Alterna-Ryan and Other-Sposito on his side and the number of plans that would have blown out of the water. But the painful hitch passes. 

He recalls the feeling of his daughter, at last, launching herself into his arms and the heartsore relief of a chasm crossed, a rift mended. He thinks of Captain Beckett, stern and painfully lost, walled off from the world and full of self-doubt. He thinks of her saying yes to what she thought was a date, of her coming after him, saving his life, and him—at last—getting to save hers. 

_Make her fall in love with you,_ he tells himself with a sigh of satisfaction as he begins to nod off. _Make her fall in love with_ her _._ It’s his plan for this and every other universe. It has always been his plan. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Alternate Universe Escape Plans—A THING. This. Not a thing. 


	7. Burnt Sienna—Once Upon a Time in the West

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They carry the sun with them back to New York. It’s a strange and complicated thing. They carry a long night traipsing through the kind of cold that shouldn’t exist in a land where the sun is still beating down for nearly twelve hours a day, even in November. They carry cheeks and noses and foreheads and chins thoroughly toasted by the sun, thoroughly scoured by sand swept along by howling winds. They carry that all back to New York. It’s strange and it’s complicated. 

> _“Well that’s what you jackaroos came for, ain’t it—the legend, and dare I say, romance of the old west?”  
> _ _— Gentleman James Grady, Once Upon a Time in the West (7 x 07)_

* * *

They carry the sun with them back to New York. It’s a strange and complicated thing. They carry a long night traipsing through the kind of cold that shouldn’t exist in a land where the sun is still beating down for nearly twelve hours a day, even in November. They carry cheeks and noses and foreheads and chins thoroughly toasted by the sun, thoroughly scoured by sand swept along by howling winds. They carry that all back to New York. It’s strange and it’s complicated. 

She’s grateful to Ryan and Esposito for the gift of this—four short days with sun and wind and sand and cold and unbearable heat. She is glad to the soles of her feet—which _still_ ache from that stupid all-night walk when the boys’ four-legged counterparts spooked and ran off—at the shamefaced sincerity of the gesture. 

She’s glad those two jerks remembered that they’re supposed to be friends, that the two of them should be over the moon for her and Castle. But they are now, and the nut-brown back of her hand is a testament to that. The deep, burnt-orange _vee_ that descends into Castle’s New York button-downs is a testament to it. 

But for all that their mutually sun-kissed, sand-scoured skin is a welcome signifier of both chosen family and mended fences, she has, it seems, a little bit of a strange relationship to that particular souvenir. It startles her every time she catches sight of it. When she reaches for the phone and sees the deep color sweeping up the back of her hand and right into her sleeve, she does a double-take. She jumps back half a dozen times a day when she catches sight of the bronze glow of her own cheeks in the mirror. 

And it’s worse when it comes to him. It’s more intense, somehow, when he turns from the kitchen counter to slide her first mug of coffee to her and she sees the strip of much paler skin left bare by the stretched-out neck of whatever shirt he’s grabbed to put on that morning—when she’s fixated on the way it frames that burnt-orange _vee_ of skin—she tries not to wince, and her heart pounds in a way that’s _complicated_. It’s strange. 

He seems to notice. That’s no surprise. For six years now, he has found fame in song and story for noticing things, and the wedding ring—their pair of wedding rings that bind them together—seems to have supercharged that. So, yeah, he notices that the sun’s kiss, the sand and wind’s stern reminder etched into his skin, have caught her attention. 

He mistakes the situation at first. Or maybe he keys into just one part of it. She’s not sure. It’s complicated. But he preens at first, and that’s not entirely right. He lingers with a towel wrapped around his waist after he emerges from the shower. He flashes what is not quite a farmer’s tan and slaps aftershave on to his gold-toasted cheeks with gusto. He plays up the bronzed god angle, and he must be right about part of it, because she takes the bait every time. She lunges for the towel, she nips hungrily at that _vee_ of skin and drags her tongue up the brown nape of his neck like she can still taste the desert there. 

But desire isn’t the whole of it. His skin and hers, a canvas those four days and more have been painted on, are stranger to her than just that. It’s all more complicated, though she can’t quite see how that is—why that is—until his skin starts to peel a few days on. 

It’s nothing at first. It’s him fidgeting in his chair. It’s him whining and holding the back of his fading hand up next to hers for comparison—for complaining that she is still perfectly bronzed while he is molting. It’s him rooting through her makeup and her moisturizers, insistent that her secret must be for sale somewhere. But it’s nothing, right? How could it be more than nothing? 

It’s a nightmare that tells her the whole story, a terrible nightmare, though it doesn’t start out that way. It starts, instead, with him in his cowboy clothes, with his hat tipped low, and him high up in the driver’s seat of the wagon. It starts with her climbing up beside him and hooking a finger through one of his belt loops.

He smiles down at her. He indulges as she nudges closer, as she threads her arm through his, as she nudges closer still and slides her arm around his waist, closer still until she’s pressed against him, but it’s hopeless. The wind takes him away from her. The sun beats down and blinds her and he slips from her grasp. The wagon falls apart, leaving her stranded. The wheels bound off in all directions and the wooden bed loses its boxy shape, its drab, weathered grey color. It becomes a sky blue dinghy and he drifts away from her—away. 

She startles awake, sweat-soaked and heart pounding. He wakes with her, just an instant afterward. It’s morning. It’s Sunday and she’s not on call and it’s full morning. The sun—the New York sun—is slipping through the slats of the blinds. It slants right across his ruddy nose, his cheeks, his chin. 

“This is wrong,” she chokes out. She reaches out to swipe her thumb along his cheekbone. She’s unguarded and half asleep. She’s _upset_ , but she understands the other piece now. “It reminds me—“ 

“Oh.” The word has a terrible solidity to it. It has the weight and force of everything they’re still dealing with, but he reaches for her hand. He presses her palm to his cheek—to the sun and sand and wind painted right on it—and holds it there. “It’ll fade though, Kate. I promise. It’ll fade.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Wut? Miserable and so not a thing. 


	8. Bad Company—Kill Switch (7 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re an aimless, anticlimactic knot at the precinct after they slap the cuffs on their profiteer. She and he, Ryan, Lanie—they have done all that they can do. They have, in a true team effort, saved the day on a much larger scale than usual, and it’s time they broke. It’s time they went they separate ways to celebrate, to contemplate, to hug their loved ones and be grateful that what could have been will never be now. 

> _“Leave the scene?”  
> _ _—Kevin Ryan, Kill Switch (7 x 08)_

* * *

They’re an aimless, anticlimactic knot at the precinct after they slap the cuffs on their profiteer. She and he, Ryan, Lanie—they have done all that they can do. They have, in a true team effort, saved the day on a much larger scale than usual, and it’s time they broke. It’s time they went they separate ways to celebrate, to contemplate, to hug their loved ones and be grateful that what could have been will never be now. 

But they’re reluctant to turn one another loose, it seems. They are one short of their full complement, and that somehow makes them reluctant. It’s as though they’re waiting, even though it’s not like Esposito is going to to suddenly walk in the door. It’s not like Esposito _can_ walk in the door until the doctors are sure it’s safe for him and every one of the people who undoubtedly wish they’d waited for the local today to be out and about among their fellow New Yorkers, to be among the loved ones they undoubtedly want to hug. 

So they tell war stories about the bank hostage standoff, about the bizarre situation with Emma Riggs. They laugh and hope that maybe Ryan’s gold-star behavior in not getting in Bigalow’s way might win them back some of the good will with HRT that Beckett and he, respectively, had managed to squander. 

They shake themselves eventually. Ryan is the first to peel himself from the desk. Jenny has texted a video of Sarah Grace toddling around the perimeter of the coffee table, lifting her hand and cautiously balancing for a second, for two before plopping her little palm back down. They _ooh_ and _ahhh_ over the video. They shake themselves. They trade sheepish smiles, because it’s silly. They should all go home. 

So they head down together. They head off in their three separate directions with just a little bit of lingering. The two of them—she and he—seem to be headed for the subway. It’s programmed into their feet, but he stops her. He reaches for her elbow. 

“Really?” He tugs her around to face him. He lifts his chin in the direction of the subway steps. “I think, just this once, we can take a cab.” 

“Gotta get back on the horse sometime.” She sticks out her tongue at him, but then her expression grows serious, shy. “And I was thinking maybe …” 

“You know we can’t see him, right?” She knows. He knows she knows, and she knows that he knows and all the way down the line. 

“I was thinking we go anyway.” She kicks at the toe of his shoe. “Just to check in.” 

“Just to check in,” he agrees, and they are on their way. 

The subway ride is considerably less eventful than the hospital, where it takes them forever to find out where Esposito even is. The press has been all over the place. They’re hungry for a snapshot or a five-second loop of video to run of serious-looking doctors and nurses zipping themselves in and out of the isolation bubbles. They’re looking for a sound byte and the hospital is, to say the least, nailing it when it comes to keeping g a lid on things—to keep the already traumatized people out of the spotlight. 

But they finally find it, thanks to her aggressive badge work and his willingness to shamelessly bribe whoever with whatever they’d like. They’re finally as close to Esposito and his care team as they’re going to get, which is not very. And they’re not the only ones. 

“Lanie?” It’s more a good-natured accusation than it is a question. Of course Lanie is here. This is absolutely an _of course_ moment. 

Lanie spins toward the sound of Kate’s voice. It’s obvious from every tense line in her body that she’s just been arguing with the implacable looking nurse on the other side of the desk. It’s obvious from the look of utter consternation on her face that she would gladly drop a smoke bomb and cut out of there, if only she had a smoke bomb. 

“Kate,” she says in a voice that is probably supposed to be bright and in-charge sounding. But Lanie’s voice is neither of those things. It is tight and quavering and embarrassed. “Castle,” she adds as though his presence is just the icing on the mortifying cake. 

He grins at her, though. He gives a little wave, then holds up one finger. “Wait for it.” He counts silently down from five, and on cue, Ryan bursts out of a stairwell door and skids to a Loony Toons stop right in front of the three of them. 

“You gu-guys—“ Ryan stutters. “You’re here. All three of you.” 

“And not one of you can see him.” The implacable nurse half rises from the desk chair, the better to glare at all of them. 

“We _know_.” 

The four of them roar the two words in unison. It cracks the tense surface they’ve all been maintaining. It makes them laugh. They lean on each other, lean on the walls, drop into the uncomfortable row of hideous guest chairs, much to the chagrin of the implacable nurse. 

“We’re just—“ He catches his breath. He wipes his streaming eyes. He settles into the chair for the long haul. They all do. “We’re just checking in.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Implacable nurses who don’t understand that you KNOW you can’t do anything—that’s a thing. This is no thing. 


	9. Maladroit—Last Action Hero (7 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t think of herself as socially awkward. Even having the thought that she’d think she was socially awkward feels alien—and convoluted to the point of inducing a headache, but the point is she doesn’t think of herself as socially awkward, because she’s not. 

> _“You really are a genius, aren’t you?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Last Action Hero (7 x 09)_

* * *

She doesn’t think of herself as socially awkward. Even having the thought that she’d _think_ she was socially awkward feels alien—and convoluted to the point of inducing a headache, but the point is she doesn’t think of herself as socially awkward, because she’s not. 

She has high school yearbooks absolutely full of evidence that she’s not socially awkward. She has mountains of evidence that she was well-liked and moved fluidly between the jocks and the stoners and the theater nerds, not that she would ever need to be so lame or so desperate as to reach all the way back to those for proof. 

She has ample, up-to-date proof that she is definitely not socially awkward. She has interrogations where she is socially savvy enough to shake people down for information. And if shakedowns count—but how could they not count?—she _also_ talks to family and friends. She breaks awful news gently, and with conviction, she assures them that she won’t rest until they have some kind of justice for the terrible loss they’ve suffered. 

So, there is the evidence, ancient and modern, assembled before the court: Kate Beckett is not now, nor has she ever been, socially awkward. Except she might be socially awkward. Or maybe … emotionally dumb? 

That tracks, of course. Her life over the last decade and a half has had some highlights of emotional stupidity, or lowlights, she supposes. Her laser focus on the academy, on making detective, on making it to homicide, all to the exclusion of any meaningful relationships, for example. The half-assed cultivation of meaningless relationships to head off anything meaningful at the pass. The decision, somewhere down the line, to lock her mother’s case away absolutely—no half measures—regardless of any changes in circumstance. The long-held conviction that no breath she drew, no joy or sorrow she ever experienced, could be as meaningful as catching her mother’s killer. 

So, yes, she’ll slap the _Hello, My Name is Kate and I Am Emotionally Dumb_ sticky label on her lapel. She’ll cop to the big stuff, but that’s not what’t nagging at her right now. It’s not what’s activating her defenses or moving her to preemptively declare that she is _not_ socially awkward. She is, right now, being emotionally dumb when it comes to little stuff, and it’s possible that it’s making her socially awkward. 

She’s upset at the eleventh hour revelation that he hates—has always hated—her apartment. She’s upset that her apartment is on the verge of not being her apartment. It’s stupid. She has spent so little time here over the last year-plus that she doubts there’s even trace DNA. But it’s hers. It has been hers, and now it won’t be hers anymore, and isn’t it completely obvious to anyone with even a fragment of a clue that she’d be upset by the prospect of leaving it?

He, apparently, doesn’t have a fragment of a clue, so at least she has some company in her emotional dumbness. 

She invites Lanie to come drink old pink wine out of mismatched mugs because she’s _upset_ and she wants someone to vent to. It feels kind of alien. She thinks she’s not the kind of person who vents, or maybe she just doesn’t vent like this? Maybe this is … new venting, and she’s bad at it. 

She complains about him. She’s always complained about what a doofus he is—how smug and vain and nosy and undisciplined and _clueless_. There has been a lot of wine downed alongside that kind of venting. But when she says it out loud, when she names the feeling, when she says she’s _upset_ , this whole interaction suddenly feels very alien indeed. 

Lanie says her line. She shakes her head in sympathy— _Well, tact isn’t exactly the man’s middle name._ And in that instant, something rears up in Kate. Just for that instant, she is _furious_ with Lanie. She is fiercely defensive of him and has the urge to jump down her friend’s throat for lending the sympathetic ear she’d asked for in the first damned place. 

It passes. The fury passes. Lanie spells out what the apartment means to her more clearly than she, in her emotional dumbness, ever could. The two of them clink mismatched mugs and toast to the best apartment ever, and it’s all mission accomplished. 

It _should be_ mission accomplished, because she’s gotten it out of her system. She has vented to Lanie and not made an issue of it with him, and that’s normal, right? That’s what normal, not emotionally dumb people, do—they vent to their BFFs when their SOs are being a little bit clueless. 

It sounds convincing. She is _convinced._ And yet when she opens the door that night and her fingers ache with the effort of carving her initials into that high-up beam, she catches sight of her ring—her wedding ring—and it hits her that they’re married. It hits her that he is her husband, and being fiercely defensive might just come with the territory. 

She barrels right into him and grabs a fistful of his shirt. “You can be a jerk sometimes,” she tells him, then kisses him hard. “But you’re also sweet.” She lets his shirt go and kicks off her heels. She heads for the office, feeling the gravitational pull of him in her wake. “And Lanie’s right.” She wheels around to face him, one finger raised. The perplexed look on his face is a strange delight. “But she can also shut up.” She drops into one of the oversized chairs and pats the seat next to her in a _glad-that’s-settled_ way. “So, are we going to watch a movie or what?” 

“A movie?’ He stammers. He’s socially awkward and emotionally confused. But he drops into the chair next to her and makes a show of settling in—of letting go whatever is happening with her strange mood. “Definitely a movie.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: That terrible apartment is not a thing, nor is this. 


	10. Temporize—Bad Santa (7 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s no way of timing this that isn’t terrible. There’s no way of framing it that he is not going to screw up. This is a band-aid situation if every there was one, but when the moment comes— when she is positively glowing with self-satisfaction over her six rhyming lines, and then the glow dims as she asks, What’s wrong?—he falters. What could be wrong? You’re here. He does not rip off the band-aid. Instead, he steals a minute or five or ten. He steals an hour from the future, because there’s no way of timing this revelation that isn’t terrible. 

> _“You want to hear God laugh, you tell him – you tell him all your plans, right?”  
> _ _—Dino Scarpella, Bad Santa (7 x10)_

* * *

There’s no way of timing this that isn’t terrible. There’s no way of framing it that he is not going to screw up. This is a band-aid situation if every there was one, but when the moment comes—when she is positively glowing with self-satisfaction over her six rhyming lines, and then the glow dims as she asks, _What’s wrong?_ —he falters. _What could be wrong? You’re here._ He does not rip off the band-aid. Instead, he steals a minute or five or ten. He steals an hour from the future, because there’s no way of timing this revelation that isn’t terrible. 

But in this stolen moment, she is dancing with Lanie. She is busting some absolutely dorky moves that only get dorkier when Ryan presses a plastic cup of eggnog into her hand. He watches with a keen eye and a heart that’s both full and broken as she fumbles the yellow scrap of legal pad out of the pocket of her blazer, and she lights up all over again as she shows it to Lanie with an odd mixture of pride and anxious caution, just in case one of those dastardly boys sneaks up to find out what the two of them are whispering about. 

He hangs back. He keeps to the edges of all the merriment. He wants to give her this—the first-ever precinct holiday party that she’s thrown herself into, because she has everything this year. She has work that she loves, that she finds meaning in. She has gotten justice for her mother, and after a harrowing stretch of time—an awful stretch of time the two of them are together. 

It’s not vanity to say that’s no small part of her happiness this year, not with the brilliant smile she keeps throwing him over her shoulder, not with the tiny waves she sneaks from across the room, because she’s curious about why he’s hanging back. She’d like to know why that is, but she’s _busy_. She is dancing dorkily with LT and with Velasquez. 

And then, there’s a contraction of time. There is a moment where the whole world blinks, and suddenly she is huddled up with Lanie again. There’s a serious vibe to it that has his heart rate spiking. He’s been watching. He’s been keeping careful track of who’s been near Gates and who’s been checking their phone. He’s been contact tracing every possible person who might have heard about McBride, who might have whispered it to the person next to them and next to them, next to them. He has been _vigilant_ and on the alert for anyone who might suddenly wrest these stolen moments away from him—away from her—and Lanie has definitely not been on the list. 

He thinks he’s messed up. He thinks he’s failed utterly to give her one damned hour to be _in this_ , and he starts across the room. Esposito intercepts, him though—Esposito with Ryan, who looks like he’s playing the role of Emotional Support Corgi, hot on his heels. There’s a serious vibe to them, too. It all but confirms that he’s screwed this up—that Lanie is telling her, even now, and he’s stuck on the wrong side of the Christmas tree with the boys trying to tell him what he already knows. 

It turns out that this is a reprieve, though. The boys are serious about something else entirely—about Lanie and Esposito breaking up yet again, about the realization they have mutually arrived at. It’s the unlikeliest of reprieves, and the look of sympathetic concern he manufactures and plasters on his face cannot be convincing at all. The boys don’t seem to notice though, and when his heart rate drops enough that he thinks it’s safe to look across the room again, she catches his eye and he sees the exact same expression on _her_ face. Because Lanie and Esposito, to borrow a simile from his beloved wife, are like the Brett Favre of breaking up. 

It’s that meeting of the minds—that connection across a crowded, festively lit room—that taps him on the shoulder and tells him that the moment has arrived. It reminds him, not unkindly, that there’s no way of timing this that isn’t terrible, that he will inevitably blurt it all out in the worst possible way so it seems like it’s all about him—that _he_ thinks it’s all about him, even though a man is dead and it doesn’t matter if he was a dirty cop or not. But forewarned is forearmed, or something. He nonetheless grabs an eggnog, because he figures it’s not possible to be _too_ forearmed. 

Lanie sees him first. Her eyes dart to Ryan and Esposito, huddled up and moping. They narrow as she dares him to shoot her a look of sympathy, a look of _I told you so_ , any kind of look at all, in fact. He drops his gaze readily to the floor. He’s sorry for Lanie or relieved for her. He is whatever he should be for Lanie and for Esposito and for everyone else in the world who has a claim on him. 

But he is all those things for all those people at several degrees of remove. Right now, everything he has in him is fixed on her—on his dearest love and this hard-won brightness of hers. Everything he has in him is fixed on screwing this up as little as possible. 

“For me?” She grins and turns the coy question into an imperious demand as she snags the fresh eggnog from him with one had and presses her empty toward him with the other. 

“Obviously for you.” He smiles at her in this, the last moment. He feels the beat of his heart and the warmth of her happiness—her contentment. Eggnog-less, he drinks it in. “Kate.” He takes her free hand. “This is terrible timing, and I’m going to say this wrong …” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Christmas is definitely not a thing right now. And neither is this. 


	11. Fabulist—Castle, P. I. (7 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicole Morris does not have a daughter. Nicole Morris does not have any children at all. Nicole Morris with her black eyes and implacable silence, does not appear to be parent material. It’s not a sin that really makes the highlight reel, given that Nicole Morris is a murderer for hire. She is an operative whose mission was not merely to take one life, but to ruin another in the process. But she doesn’t have a daughter, and lying about having a daughter to Shana Baker seems especially … villainous to her somehow. 

> _“We, Mr. Castle?”  
> _ _—Victoria Gates, Castle, P. I. (7 x11)_

* * *

Nicole Morris does not have a daughter. Nicole Morris does not have any children at all. Nicole Morris with her black eyes and implacable silence, does not appear to be parent material. It’s not a sin that really makes the highlight reel, given that Nicole Morris is a murderer for hire. She is an operative whose mission was not merely to take one life, but to ruin another in the process. But she doesn’t have a daughter, and lying about having a daughter to Shana Baker seems especially … villainous to her somehow. 

Certainly this fixation has something to do with Shana Baker herself. It has to do with a well-appointed, but rather generic apartment she doesn’t seem to have spent much time in, and her single-minded devotion to Sparkles the Shedding Machine. 

It has, particularly, to do with Shana Baker’s office, with its artistic alphabet prints running all around the perimeter and its carefully framed blocks of construction paper and tiny handprints made with poster paint. It has to do with the fact that the woman had a decidedly odd vocation, and yet, given the office, the meager bank account, the long, long hours she dedicated to the children of New York’s rich, famous, and difficult to deal with, vocation seems to be the only word for it. And Nicole Morris lied about having one of those children, about being—or at least wanting to be—one of those difficult-to-deal-with parents. That seems, to her, especially villainous. 

She’d like to leave it at that. She’d like to file her Nicole Morris–related baggage in one of Shana Baker’s meticulously organized horizontal cabinets and get over it, but the baggage might not be about Shana Baker at all. It might still be about Shana Baker’s office. It might be about a particular moment there, with him crouched down in front of those meticulously organized horizontal cabinets and tossing the absolutely casual comment over his shoulder. _People do insane things for their kids. You’ll see._

And she _had_ seen, of course. Brian Whitman’s unhinged recorded message had absolutely nothing on the look of abject fear on the man’s face when he thought the deal for his son’s admission might be unraveling. She’d seen the long line of Type-A, high-powered moms and dads holding their kids’ hands on the way into Eastborne, not leaving it to the Nanny, to the Au Pair, to the hired help every one of them most definitely has. 

She had seen herself in that line, or one like it. She had seen him in that line—astral projections or ghosts or simple inevitabilities of the not-too distant future—and she had felt … a thrill. She’d felt terror, too, of course. That’s eternal when this subject swims up into her conscious mind. She had felt the rib-kick of conviction that she will never want alphabet artwork or framed handprint butterflies, that her not-a-baby-person status is just the tip of the iceberg and she will be an absolute disaster when it comes to children. She’d felt all that in Shana Baker’s office, but she’d felt a thrill, too, an eagerness for the challenge. 

She doesn’t know how they’ll do it. She thinks about their madcap life and the fact that they have just mutually agreed that it’s not going to get any _less_ madcap any time soon, because he’s going to keep on with the PI thing and hijinks are more or less a certainty. She sort of envisions him in a Philip Marlowe–style trench coat with a baby Bjorn strapped to his chest beneath it. She’s sort of a puddle of goo after she envisions that, and this is not the time to be a puddle of goo—not while she’s still dotting her _I_ s and crossing her _T_ s on the Shana Baker Cased. So she blots out the image. She tries to, anyway. 

It helps to think about Nicole Morris and her villainy. That’s a good blotting-out strategy. It’s excellent for focusing her mind on something other than jumping him and getting started with this madcap adventure immediately or sooner, and she needs to focus her mind on other things. The thrill in Shana Baker’s office is one thing. The Nicole Morrises of the world are another thing, entirely, and there are too damned many of them running around free for the two of them to go careening down that path right now. 

Plus … she likes their life at the moment. She likes savoring expensive wine and spontaneous Sherlock Holmes role play. She likes the idea of making out at will in his shiny new office. She likes their wedding rings and the way life is ineffably different since they slid them on. 

And there’s still the terror. There’s still the conviction. Those are exaggerated enough that she knows they’re ridiculous. But beneath that layer of hyperbole, there’s still the dead-serious worry that for all the work she has done with Burke and without him, the cracks in her psyche are just too many, too wide, too structural for her to love the way a parent needs to love. 

There’s all of that, but there’s also the thrill. There’s also the fact that she thinks Nicole Morris is a black-hearted villain, and she—Kate Beckett—would never lie about having a daughter. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The murderer must have been lying about having a kid. That’s a thing. This is not a thing.


	12. Booster—Castle Private Eye Caramba! (7 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a pleasant feeling to have her backing him in this whole P. I. venture. It sounds stupid. It sounds, in multiple ways, like something he shouldn’t have to say, even in the confines of his own head. She’s his wife, his partner, his best friend—of course she’s backing him, and of course that’s pleasant, but it ought to be pleasant in such an everyday way that it should hardly even register. But it registers for him. It’s pleasant that she’s backing him.

> _“And you know what I was expecting?”  
>  — Sofia Del Cordova, Private Eye Caramba! (7 x 12) _

* * *

It’s a pleasant feeling to have her backing him in this whole P. I. venture. It sounds stupid. It sounds, in multiple ways, like something he shouldn’t have to say, even in the confines of his own head. She’s his wife, his partner, his best friend—of _course_ she’s backing him, and of course that’s pleasant, but it ought to be pleasant in such an everyday way that it should hardly even register. But it registers for him. It’s pleasant that she’s backing him. 

The fact that it registers is not at all about her. For all that they have always played rough with one another, for all their teasing and penchant for one-upmanship, she has never been stingy with credit or compliments. She has, at times, been _grudging_ with them, but that mostly has to do with his reflex, not quite so exaggerated now as it once was, to rush in, singing his own praises. And that’s kind of what it’s about, this comment-worthy pleasant feeling. 

His self-congratulatory tendencies are half defense mechanism. Or _part_ defense mechanism, anyway. His life story involves stumbling through the first two decades of his life, unremarked upon and unnoticed, perennially out of place, then vaulting ahead to the part where he’s a best-selling author with legions of fans who adore him at least as much for the photo on the book jacket, the charm offensive he launches on every talk show after each new book, as they do for the things he writes. 

It’s pleasant being adored. That sounds stupid, too. Who wouldn’t find adoration pleasant? But the thing is, it’s a pleasure that’s far from unalloyed. The legions of adoring fans are fickle, for one thing. They are as happy to feed on failure as on success, so there’s that to worry about. But even without that, the adoration of strangers really doesn’t have a _thing_ on the pleasure he finds in knowing she’s backing him. 

Her support doesn’t come without questions. It doesn’t come without reservations, but that amplifies the sensation, rather than diminishes it. He knows she’s dubious about how he’s spending his time—she suspects that his work on the website might be “work” in skeptical quotation marks. But when she sees it, she’s impressed. Likewise, he sees his own chagrin over the subject of his first background check reflected in her face, but he also sees her pride in the fact that he’s determined to put in the work, even the decidedly unglamorous work. 

It means the world to him that she sends Sofia Del Cordova his way, even taking into consideration the awkward way that starts out. It warms him, genuinely and from head to toe, when Sofia repeats her apparently glowing referral— _She said you are the best._ It’s a kindness and a pleasant fiction.

It’s recognition of talents she’s seen in action when he’s had police resources at his disposal, but it’s also a prediction for the future, a vision of what he can do when left to his own devices. And it’s all rooted in her unshakable faith in him, and it makes him want to live up to it. It makes him want to _be_ the best, whether the stakes of the case are finding a murderer or recovering a lost item. 

It means the world, too, that she swings by to fetch him at the end of a long day. She doesn’t even call to see if he’s still there. She simply _assumes_ that he’s still hard at work, because she’s backing him on this. She believes that for the moment, at least, he’s committed to making a go of this, so she comes to fetch him in the one place she knows he must be. 

That show of faith ends awkwardly, to say the least, and he’s a little too high on the pleasant sensation that her backing him brings. He foolishly tries to shoot the moon on the white limo front, first with his epically bad timing in trying to hit her up for the VIN search, and then having done his own search—sort of— when he gets extracurricular about tracking it down. 

She’s mad at him about it. She’s scared for him and what could have happened with Mathis. She dresses him down right there in the precinct, right there in front of the boys. But beneath the persistent mortification of getting caught in his office, half undressed, by Sofia Del Cordova, beyond her fears that he’s going to rush headlong into danger, she’s genuinely impressed by his grit and his ingenuity. She sees the work his putting in. 

She’s backing him in this thing that matters to him, that might actually matter to others, if he sticks with it. It’s a pleasant feeling. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: True love and support, as opposed to distant adoration. I have heard these are things, but this here? Not a thing. 


	13. . . . Makes the Heart—I, Witness (7 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She wishes he had told the woman on the other end of the phone no. It’s the farthest thing from fair, and she’s glad that’s the voice that wins the race to the tip of her tongue when he, rightly pleased with himself, announces that he’s the one getting the call for once. She is legitimately glad that she sells the fantastic, she sells the It’s not like I don’t leave … well enough that he’s able to recapture the ebullient feeling. She is definitely, honestly, and lots of other -ly words glad. But she still kind of wishes he’d told that woman no. 

> _“What—_ My _damage?”  
> _ _— Richard Castle, I, Witness (7 x 13)_

* * *

She wishes he had told the woman on the other end of the phone no. It’s the farthest thing from fair, and she’s glad that’s the voice that wins the race to the tip of her tongue when he, rightly pleased with himself, announces that he’s the one getting the call for once. She is legitimately glad that she sells the _fantastic_ , she sells the _It’s not like I don’t leave_ … well enough that he’s able to recapture the ebullient feeling. She is definitely, honestly, and lots of other _-ly_ words glad. But she still kind of wishes he’d told that woman no. 

Because now she’s at the precinct. Now she’s feeling his absence here like a hundred tiny pinpricks an hour. She feels the boredom of not very important paperwork without him to gripe at every time he distracts her from her very important paperwork. She feels defensive every time someone asks after him, asks how the PI business is going, and even though most of the inquiries are good natured enough—sincere enough—she feels defensive and oversells. 

Today, she is particularly feeling his absence, because Ryan and Jenny have taken the ill-advised step of trying to fix Esposito— _Esposito_ —up, and she has all kinds of thoughts about that. These range from _How dare you?_ on Lanie’s behalf to _Oh, thank God!_ also on Lanie’s behalf, and kind of on her own, because Esposito is less a brooding, Byronic hero than he is whiny. But she also has questions for Mr. and Mrs. Ryan, like who the hell would have signed up for a convenient-for-all-your-murder-and-body-disposal-needs ski weekend with Esposito and Lanie? 

In short, she has a lot of things she needs him pretty urgently for today. But he’s not even available for whispered phone conversations or text sniping. Instead, he’s off having potential clients and whatever, and whether it’s fair or not, she wishes he’d said no to the woman on the other end of the phone. 

She wishes he had told Eva Whitfield, as the name of the woman on the other end of the phone turns out to be, no. Her fairer, more reasonable inclinations don’t quite win the race to the tip of her tongue this time. _Wait, tonight?_ she blurts as though she has not reached for the phone, half naked, mid-make out plenty of times. But she was looking forward to to making it way past half naked and her ambitions go far beyond making out. 

But he wonders aloud what he was supposed to tell his friend, who wants to see, in living color, that her marriage is well and truly over, and her fairer, more reasonable inclinations show up, panting, but ready to respond when he asks her, more than a little miserably, to remind him never to take this kind of case again. She reminds him that saying yes to things he’s not necessarily excited about is part of the plan for making a go of the PI thing. And, still feeling a twinge of guilt over the fact that she’s faking it till she makes it today, she goes the extra mile and offers to cook him dinner. 

Guilt-motivated or not, the offer to cook ends up lifting her spirits, at least in the short term. She has the loft to herself and the role-reversal is pleasant. She enjoys the solitude for the way it builds the pleasant anticipation of seeing him. She enjoys the work of her hands and the excellent-smelling fruits of her labor. She has everything on the food front well underway and she eyes the rest of the loft like a battlefield waiting for her to wage war. She thinks about the pleasant tables he has set for her and the way he can, without fail, anticipate whether it’s a wine and jazz and candlelight night for her, or one of those days when she wants junk food and beer on the couch. 

She eyes up the theater on which her victory will play out. She tries to put herself in his shoes—to think about the cues he must be picking up on in her voice, in details like an actual phone call versus a terse series of texts. She’s good-naturedly cursing his name, because she can’t figure out at all how he always knows, when the phone rings. She does a little soft shoe of triumph. She’s sure the stars have aligned and she’ll know from this well-timed call exactly what it is that he listens for. 

But his voice breaks up. What she hears of it is heart-stoppingly frantic. The call drops, The screen of her phone goes horribly blank. Fear climbs the back of her throat and the only thought in her head is that she wishes he’d said no to Eva Whitfield. 

The phone rings again, a million years later. It has to have been a million years, and she’s been standing there. She has just been _standing_ there, doing nothing. But she hears his voice, faint and no less frantic. He doesn’t sound right. On any number of levels, he doesn’t sound right, and she makes him stay on the phone while she juggles the landline and calls the Westchester PD. She makes him stay on the phone while she races to her car and tries to will Manhattan traffic out of existence. 

She finally hangs up—grudgingly hangs up—when and only when she knows local law enforcement is on the scene. She lets her foot grow heavy on the gas pedal and beats the steering wheel and fumes about head injuries and yet more memory loss. She beats the steering wheel and fumes about the very real possibility that he could have died in those damned woods—he could have disappeared for good this time and left her never knowing.

Her tires screech as she brakes to a hard stop near the Westchester cruisers are pulled up at disorganized angles. She sees him startle as her headlights sweep across the scene. She sees in that instant, the fear and bewilderment, the trauma and grief and guilt written all across his face. She beats the steering wheel one last time. She composes herself as best she can. She climbs out of the car and she races to him. She folds herself into his arms and whispers, _Castle, I’m so glad you’re okay_. 

She bites her tongue. She doesn’t tell him she wishes—devoutly wishes—he had told Eva Whitfield no. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The timeline of Castle’s unconsciousness … it’s a wonky thing. Much like this would be. Were it A Thing. Which it is not. 


	14. Deciduous—Resurrection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is in charge of the match box that holds Jerry Tyson’s tooth—his baby tooth. Jerry Tyson was a baby once. He was a toddler, a boy, a hellion with teeth that fell out of his young mouth, as baby teeth do. It’s an appalling thought—an appalling object he holds cupped between his palms like some hideous insect he doesn’t quite have the heart to kill. 

> _“It’s weird, right?”_   
>  _— Jerry Tyson, Resurrection (7 x 14)_

* * *

He is in charge of the match box that holds Jerry Tyson’s tooth—his baby tooth. Jerry Tyson was a baby once. He was a toddler, a boy, a hellion with teeth that fell out of his young mouth, as baby teeth do. It’s an appalling thought—an appalling object he holds cupped between his palms like some hideous insect he doesn’t quite have the heart to kill. 

“I’m okay,” he says, heading her question off at the pass. She needs to drive. She needs get them back to the city. She needs to get the tooth to the lab and Jerry Tyson into the deepest, darkest hole the criminal justice system has available, so there’s no time for his strangely selective queasiness about the whole thing. “Just drive.” 

She listens to him, for once. She drives. She grips the steering wheel tight and zips into the passing lane, then back over to the right. Their speed meets an awkward seam in the asphalt that jounces the car, that jostles the horrible little object in its clunking cardboard matchbox. He shudders. She shudders. 

“People do this. They keep … teeth around?” The question makes its way slowly into the world. Her head swings briefly around toward him, her eyes wide. “Did _you_ do this?” She swivels her head away from him and fixes her attention on the road. He has the sense that she’s steeling herself for the answer she does not want to hear. “With Alexis. You must have.” 

“I didn’t,” he jumps in. “I was going to. I bought the thing.” 

He tries to gesture, to describe the size and shape of the odd little engraved thing he’d gotten because he had been intent on hitting every _supposed to_ once it was obvious even to Alexis that Meredith was gone more or less for good. He ends up shaking the matchbox, though. He ends up setting the damned thing tumbling from edge to edge, making that hollow, unnerving sound. He winces. She winces. 

There’s an awkward silence. She swallows hard and dives into it. “You bought the thing, but—?” 

He plans on shrugging. He plans on somehow laughing this off—lightening the mood in keeping with his usual contributions to their road trips. That’s his plan, but things go a different way. 

“I found my own,” he hears himself say. “In a glass tube with a cork stopper. My first four teeth and my first curl in this glass tube.” 

The memory comes to him all at once, shocking him with its vivid detail. He was seven, maybe. He remembers the striped shirt he was wearing, the scent wafting up from the drawer in his mother’s dresser. He remembers the tear in the hideous green apartment carpet that he was always tripping over and the feeling of threading his tongue through the empty space right next to his bottom left eye tooth. He remembers the rattle of enamel on glass and the way he felt the sound snarling its way up his spine. 

“I didn’t know they were mine. Except I kind of did know. And I wasn’t supposed to be in my mother’s room at all, so I couldn’t ask her, and I just knew they were _there_ in the apartment. It creeped me out.” It’s a lame finish, but it’s all he can manage, because they’ve hit another bump and the improvised percussion instrument between his palms makes itself known again. “So with Alexis, I did the tooth fairy thing, and just …” He tries to let the ellipsis do the heavy lifting, but that’s not the way this conversation is going. 

“You just what, tossed them in the trash?” It’s sarcasm at first—it’s an unthinkable possibility, but them her gaze sweeps back toward him. She’s looking decidedly queasy now, and he knows the feeling. “Do people toss them in the trash? Teeth?” 

“I don’t _know!”_ He’s close to snapping at her. He really doesn’t remember what he did. He certainly can’t picture his own foot on the pedal of the stainless steel kitchen trash can, tiny pearly whites cupped in his palm. He can’t picture it, but that’s certainly along the lines of what he must have done. “How would I know what people do?” 

“I’m not asking about people, Castle!” The heel of her hand thumps the steering wheel for emphasis. “I’m asking about what _you_ did. If you didn’t keep them, and you didn’t pitch them—“ 

“I lost them!” he exclaims. “I think I just put them somewhere out of sight and just waited to forget where they were.” He’s babbling, but his spine suddenly straightens. The story sounds plausible. “I think that’s what I did.” 

There’s another awkward silence. There’s the dull rubber thump of the tires on the road. There’s no sound from inside the horrible little box he’s pressing between his palms. 

“We’re not doing that,” she declares, just when he thinks the silence might stretch all the way to Manhattan. “Whenever it’s a good time or not a bad time, or whenever we decide to just go for it.” She shakes her head, eyes firmly on the road. “No engraved whatever or test tube—“ 

“No matchboxes,” he adds. He thinks about shaking the important cargo pressed between his palms, but he doesn’t quite dare. 

She scowls at him hard enough that he’s confident not daring was the right move. “Definitely no matchboxes.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Teeth being creepy is a thing. Not, like, toenails creepy. Toenails are the worst. That’s a thing. This is not. 


	15. Proclivity—Reckoning (7 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t want to hear the long story about the assault charges, whatever her stupid tongue might say. She wants to un-hear everything Gates says—threatened, unarmed, gun. She does not want to hear this. She may never want to. 

> _“You know what part I liked best?”  
>  — Jerry Tyson, Reckoning (7 x 15)_

* * *

She doesn’t want to hear the long story about the assault charges, whatever her stupid tongue might say. She wants to un-hear everything Gates says— _threatened, unarmed, gun_. She does not want to hear this. She may never want to. 

That thought unsettles her. It sends a snaking, unpleasant sensation all through her, because what does that say? She looks at her own split fingernails, the raw, wrecked tips of her fingers. Her palm, her wrist, her whole arm, right up to the shoulder, aches from clamping her fingers around Kelly Nieman’s, from gripping the scalpel, from swinging the blade in the ruthless arc that ended Kelly Nieman’s life. What does it say about her that she might never want to hear about him pulling a gun on Jerry Tyson, all in the name of finding her—of saving her life?

She can’t think about that right now, and mercifully, no one is asking her to. They are asking her literally every other question under the sun, but no one is making a hypocrisy check as they go over and over the abduction, Kelly Nieman’s gruesome plans for her, Kelly Nieman’s even more gruesome death. No one seems worried about whatever mental tap dancing she might be doing about the things _he’s_ done in her absence. 

_He_ is not asking her to think about it. When they are at liberty at last, when they can go home, it strikes her that he might be the second-to-last person in the world who wants to talk about the assault charges, about the sound of breaking glass in the instant before the bullet entered Jerry Tyson’s chest. They might be jostling and hip-checking one another to the be very last person on earth who wants to talk about any of that. 

The subject, though, worms its way in between them. He has to call Martha and Alexis. He _should_ have called them before now. 

“I texted,” he says as he raises his hands in defense. “While you were cleaning up back—“ He falters. He looks at her as though he’s shocked find himself suddenly knee-deep in quicksand. “While you were cleaning up, I texted.” His eyes drop to the floor. 

“You should call.” She goes to him. She tugs his phone from his the back pocket and places it in his hand. She folds his fingers around it. “They won’t really believe it until they hear your voice.” 

“And you’re going to …?” He trails off, torn. He needs to hear their voices just as much as they need to hear his, but he’s having trouble letting her out of his sight. She’s having the same trouble, but the throbbing pain from her fingertips to her shoulder blades might be enough to tempt her away, for a little while at least. 

“Shower.” She rolls her neck, wincing as she finds the edge of pain. It’s only partly a performance. “I need _our_ shower.” 

“Oh, but if you need _our_ shower, then surely you need me.“ He’s teasing now. He’s pretending to put the phone away, but that’s a performance, too.

“Call,” she says simply, quietly, and he nods. 

She can hear him hovering just outside the bathroom door she has pointedly closed. At first, she can hear him, though he’s one to roam as he talks, anyway, and if ever a phone call called for roaming, it’s this one. His voice fades and she’s left to confront the pointedly closed bathroom door. She’s left to wonder if it represents all the things she doesn’t want to hear. 

There’s too much of Paris in this for her not to wonder. She stares at the pointedly closed bathroom door and half expects to hear Douglas Stevens’ screams through it. She pictures his face, blank and cold, his voice, absolutely chilling— _When it comes to the people I love, I do._

She cries in the shower. It’s to be expected. That’s the dispassionate diagnosis her mind offers up. The tears simply come, stinging the corners of her eyes and disappearing into the scalding stream. They’re tears for what he had to do, what they both had to do in the face of such evil. They’re tears for how much it must have hurt him—how it will go on hurting him—to have done all he must have done. They’re tears that decide her. 

She cranks the shower off with no little regret. She can feel, more than hear, the rise and fall of his voice somewhere in the loft. She dries herself and re-bandages the worst of the wounds on her hands. She dresses and slides into their bed. She waits for him. 

He’s not long, once he realizes she’s already out of the shower. He makes a joke about shopping, about the loft to themselves for a few day so they can regroup. They have their quiet exchange about how they do this—how they keep on living through this and everything else the fates have thrown at them these last few months. They settle their bodies together. 

She’d like to leave the quiet alone. She’d like to dedicate the foreseeable future to pressing her ear to the the blessed _thump-thump_ of his heart, but what does that say about her? What does it say. 

So, she doesn’t leave the quiet alone. “Castle, tell me. Tell me everything.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Willingness to do violence. This is a thing. Up close and personal scalpel killing, also a thing. But this? Totes not a thing. 


	16. Enclosure—The Wrong Stuff (7 x16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s always wanted to write a locked-room mystery. Or at least one of those cozy country-side cottage mysteries, where a snowstorm has rendered the roads impassible, neatly sealing the victim, the crime scene, and every last potential suspect in a bottle. He’s always marveled at the way the masters pull it off—Christie, Sayers, Chesterton, even Conan Doyle, from time to time. 

> _“Bro, where’re you going to run?”  
>  — Javier Esposito, The Wrong Stuff (7 x 16)_

* * *

He’s always wanted to write a locked-room mystery. Or at least one of those cozy country-side cottage mysteries, where a snowstorm has rendered the roads impassible, neatly sealing the victim, the crime scene, and every last potential suspect in a bottle. He’s always marveled at the way the masters pull it off—Christie, Sayers, Chesterton, even Conan Doyle, from time to time. 

He stands in awe or their ability to bring people together over such simple things—an evening meal, a fireside conversation, an afternoon in the garden—and let the inner workings of the characters supply the drama. He, of course, relies on cities, on exotic locations, on guns and chases and screaming subway trains. He relies on bridges and gravity and construction sites and the brown, churning waters of the Hudson to carry his narratives. 

He invests in his characters—his main characters, anyway—but the human-driven drama of their cozy cottage on Mars is something that seems humblingly well beyond the stretch of his imagination. He’s not even that interested in the MIRA angle, and honestly, human manipulation of an advanced AI should really be lighting his space-loving, rise-of-the-machines-anticipating fire. But it’s the humans that have really captured his attention. 

He wonders if Haroum was in the know about the recently kindled flame between Commander Kim and Angela Olvera. He wonders how he could _not_ have been aware of it, but that just leads to more questions. 

“I mean—a lifetime of being a third wheel. He can’t have known he was signing up for that when they hatched the plan.” He’s following her around the bedroom. He has a tendency to go on about it lately. He’s not exactly endearing himself to her, but he can’t help the million questions bubbling beneath the surface. “Or maybe …” He stops, struck by a sudden thought. “Was he, like … _into_ that?”

“Yes, Castle,” she says. The sarcasm easily penetrates the thick fabric of the turtleneck she’s currently hauling up over her head. “Haroum was definitely into it. They were all into it. They were going to found a utopian thruple-based society on Mars.” 

“Stop showing off,” he says testily as he crosses the room to lend a hand in freeing her from the uncooperative confines of her sweater. “Your people-driven plots are always better than mine.” He tosses the turtleneck aside and pulls her to him. “And pornier.” 

“Better and pornier? Aren’t those mutually exclusive when it comes to plot?” She slips out of his grasp. She’s laughing, but a little bit annoyed—maybe more than a little bit annoyed that his mind is stranded on Mars. The bare skin of her back, her neck, the curve of her hips just above the low waist of her jeans suggest that she’s not just annoyed with him. 

She really did, for whatever reason, seem to get the mother load of MIRA’s toxic atmosphere dump, and no wonder she’s not that interested in musing on the inevitable interpersonal dramas that would have unfolded between their conspiring astronauts. 

“Yikes,” he mutters under his breath. His fingers hover just over the scattered patches of raised red bumps. “Still no better?” 

“It’s fine,” she says shortly, but she can’t suppress a hiss as her nails brush a particularly angry-looking archipelago when she reaches up and behind to undo the clasp of her bra. She pivots to face him, the bra still pressed to her chest. “Just … no more Mars talk tonight, okay?” 

“No more Mars talk.”

He turns her gently by the minute areas on each of her shoulders that it’s safe to touch and marches her into the en suite. He wrests the bra from her and talks her out of her jeans, her panties, for purely therapeutic purposes. He examines her from head to toe, in the flesh and in the mirror. 

“Bath or lotion?” he asks at last. 

He’s using his Dad Tactics on her. He is offering red pants or blue pants, preemptively taking off the table the option of no pants at all. She does not appreciate the Dad Tactics, judging from the way her eyes narrow and her teeth flash. 

“How about murder?” She turns to loop her arms around his neck, a genuinely dangerous smile on her face. “How about I _murder_ you, because hardly got this stupid rash at all?” 

“Terrible, Beckett.” He tamps down his guilt and gently disentangles the fingers she has hooked together behind his neck. “That is a truly terrible people-driven plot.” He leads her to sit on the edge of the tub. He starts the taps, testing the water until they’re the perfect lukewarm mix. “I am, hands down, the most obvious murder victim in this locked-room mystery.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This was supposed to be about cozy locked-room murders at the loft, with Benjamin, the Pajama Stealer, as the obvious victim. But then it turned dermatological. Which, Brain Pony, is not a thing. Humph. 


	17. Outreach—Hong Kong Hustle (7 x 17)

> _“This is her target?”  
>  — Richard Castle, Hong Kong Hustle (7x 17)_

* * *

She means it when she tells him that she hopes she and Zhang will keep in touch. She hears herself say it, and it’s like stepping out of her body to watch, to nod approvingly as she says it: _I hope so._

She’s grateful to him for asking the question. The right question at the right time—it’s one of his talents. Of course, the wrong question at the wrong time is _also_ one of his talents, so broken clocks, twice a day, and all that. But this is the right question. It’s an _important_ question, as it turns out: _You think you and Zhang will stay in touch?_ It is the answer she didn’t necessarily know until just now, as she stepped out of her body to watch: _I hope so_. 

She does hope so, because this whole case has been one about loneliness. She’s sick thinking about Zhu Yin and even Mei Wu, terrible as her crime was. Her stomach churns and anger wells up in her when she thinks about their fates—the terrible conditions they and so many others live under. Her stomach churns and anger wells up her when she thinks how lonely a life it has to be, not even having the freedom to trust anyone, to make even the most fragile of human connections. She hopes she and Zhang keep in touch, because there are million ways to be lonely in this world, and the freedom to trust is a rare commodity they shouldn’t squander. 

She hopes so, because Zhang is an inspiration _and_ a cautionary tale. Both are true, however much of a mess the woman may feel her life is at the moment, as she tries to reconnect with her husband, her children. She hopes she’ll get a glimpse into the inner workings of that kind of ambition, that level of accomplishment, even as Zhang adjusts course to seek something more meaningful than the perfect public-facing life. 

She hopes so, because she wants the chance for them to truly commiserate over the friends they have lost, the friends they have let down—Henry, Royce. She hopes that with time—when the wounds are less raw than they are right now—she’ll have a chance to tell Zhang that she will always carry the weight of Henry’s death, but there will come a time, too, when it fades enough that the good memories—the joy and warmth of his friendship—will win out most days. She hopes they can forge a bond out of that shared loss.

She hopes the two of them will keep in touch so because … it would be good practice for her? No, more than that, keeping in touch with Zhang—building a new relationship with mentor, a peer, a colleague, a friend—that itself would be spreading her wings. It would be moving her forward in life in ways that are not _just_ professional, and she is built for that now, or she’s getting there, anyway. She has worked hard to be more. She has worked hared on this mended heart, this soul that’s been expanding these last few years as she’s opened herself to him, to Martha and Alexis, to Lanie and the boys in new and important ways, and even to Gates. 

She hopes that she and Zhang keep in touch, because she thinks that she could be good for the good Inspector as she tries to get her life back into some kind of balance. It’s a revelation that knocks her back. She is good for the people in her life. She looks down at her list—black on white on the iPad, with the cursor blinking—and sees how narrowly she’s been defining her future. 

She’s been careful, as she tells him, to think about the things she’ll cling to—the things she’ll carry with her, whatever mountain she decides to climb. Between the lines of her list are things like making more time, more space for her dad, for stitching him more fully into the fabric of this life she is making here with Castle and his rambunctious family. There are things like the pangs of covetousness she felt when she pulled up the picture of Zhang’s adorable children. Between the lines of her list she has written the growing certainty that she wants that, though she’s terrified, too. 

It’s a good list she has going, but it leans hard into the cautionary tale that Zhang is. It’s a list punctuated with emergency lights and hazard signs. It’s a list that is wary of the Kate Beckett of three years ago, of four, of seven of ten years ago, and she is not that Kate Beckett. 

She hasn’t fallen behind. She is doing just fine. She has landed a man who asks the right question at the right time, and she is good for the people in her life. She could be good for Zhang and who knows who else. It’s a heart-mending, soul-expanding revelation. 

She’s grateful to him for it. She is ebullient and in no mood to dim the magic by explaining _why_ she’s grateful in so many words. She latches on, instead, to his sweet platitude about being always by her side. She straddles him, and with fire in her eyes, she takes aim at his own professional envy: “You are so much better than Patterson.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I think my sweet bebe does not necessarily realize she is a good friend, a good partner. This made me sad today. Sadness is a thing? This is not a thing. 


	18. Perchance—At Close Range (7 x18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s not actually an idiot. Except for the times when he is an idiot. But this is not one of those times. Crime Stat Briefings. He is falling asleep before the -ing can even elevate his soft palate. There are budding, single-celled organisms that would call shenanigans on anyone who would juxtapose the word fascinating to that particular arrangement of syllables. Add in Ryan and Esposito’s sub–public access acting skills and counting on even idiots to buy in is a mistake. 

> _“You guys, what if we’re looking at this the wrong way?”  
> _ _— Kate Beckett, At Close Range (7 x18)_

* * *

He’s not actually an idiot. Except for the times when he _is_ an idiot. But this is not one of those times. Crime Stat Briefings. He is falling asleep before the _-ing_ can even elevate his soft palate. There are budding, single-celled organisms that would call shenanigans on anyone who would juxtapose the word _fascinating_ to that particular arrangement of syllables. Add in Ryan and Esposito’s sub–public access acting skills and counting on even idiots to buy in is a mistake. 

He would be deeply offended that the boys seem to think no time at all has passed—that he is still gullible enough not to realize that “running her through missing persons” is code for death by a thousand paper cuts—if it were not for the fact that their lame attempt at a practical joke has inspired him to formulate a plan so excellent it will put a spring in the step of a certain Detective who has take a too-serious turn lately. It will also, coincidentally, save him from an afternoon of writing. To be sure, he _needs_ to write, but what’s an author to do when he is called to higher things? They formulate an excellent plan, that’s what.

She is not on to his excellent plan. When she realizes that he’s trailing after them on their way to this late-afternoon-consuming atrocity, she looks at him like … well, she looks at him like he’s an idiot. He forgives her, though, because she, at least, is looking at him like he’s an idiot for voluntarily descending into this particular circle of hell. He forgives her because she’s too distracted to even register the way Ryan and Esposito keep laying it on thick, the way he keeps playing along. She’s too serious, too in her own head, and that just makes the case for his excellent plan even stronger. 

But he realizes the plan is in jeopardy as soon as they file into the spiritually beige room that is to be the scene of the crime. The room is actually mauve and grey and teal. It is dominated by chairs with upholstery in a tragically busy geometric pattern that ought to be overstimulating, and yet he is actually nodding off before they take their seats. Nodding off is definitely not in the plan.

He thinks it’s the podium. He suspects that the hulking laminate thing is no mere piece of furniture, it is a super weapon that emits powerful enervating rays. And who would develop such a thing? Clearly the cadre of beige individuals milling about at the front of the room, no doubt discussing laser pointers. Their path to world domination clearly involves sapping humanity’s will to live, one unsuspecting room full of city employees at a time, and his excellent plan may be an early casualty. 

It’s the merry pranksters themselves who inadvertently save the day. They are dead certain their little joke has landed. They’re smug enough to trade smirks right out in the open, self-satisfied that enough that they hardly even bother to hide their feed-the-birds victory lap under the mauve and grey and teal table. It’s in their complacency that he finds strength. It’s in their cocksure attitude that his purpose is renewed. 

He plays out his role a little longer. He fetches out his large-format moleskine and an array of pens. He busies himself lining them up, straightening the notebook so that its edge runs parallel to the table's edge. He leans forward eagerly when the lights go out. He makes a show of clicking open the fanciest of the pens before him. 

He scratches a note straight off—meaningless numbers that he thinks beige speaker number one has just mumbled into the ether. He scratches out another and another until Esposito, who is sitting to his left, is nudging Ryan. He keeps on scratching until their confusion—their _agitation_ —over the fact that he appears to be genuinely fascinated is palpable. He keeps on scratching until they slump, sullen and defeated in their seats, now totally vulnerable to the podium’s enervation rays. 

Then and only then does he turn his attention to the primary target of his plan—the lovely, and lately too-serious Detective Beckett. Then and only then does he slip from the back of his moleskine the first in a series of notes he prepared earlier. 

_You wanna make out?_

He slides the slip of paper toward her with exaggerated subtlety. She sees it, stark white against the totalizing spiritual beige, and does a double take. She snatches it up and crumples it tight in her fist. She flicks the briefest of glares at him. He waits for one slide to go by—another, another. He slides the second of the notes her way. 

_Y/N?_

She snatches that up, too. She’s on the alert now, so he slides the third toward her even as she’s snatching up the second to dispose of the evidence. It’s a repeat, sort of, except he’s pre-circled the _Y_ and written _My Vote_ below it with an arrow arcing toward the circle. 

She doesn’t crumple that one. She flips it over. She snatches the pen from his hand and scratches out a message of her own— _I Hate You_ , all caps. She starts to slide it back toward him, then thinks better of it. She retrieves the slip and underlines the message. Several times. She’s shoving it back toward him as he’s sliding the next toward her. Their messages are two ships passing in the beige. 

She kicks him under the table when she catches sight of message number three—prewritten message number three. _So that’s a maybe?_ She kicks him, but then she twines her ankle around his. She gives him a predatory sideways smile that makes him gulp. She takes up the pen again. She underlines the last word with a lazy swoop. 

And that’s his excellent plan, excellently executed. That’s a maybe. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Castle definitely has pre-written notes asking her if she wants to make out. You never know when the opportunity will—ahem—arise. That is A THING. This is not a thing. Happy new year everyone. 


	19. Superhuman—Habeas Corpse (7 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is not good at everything, whatever he says. Whatever he has always said, it’s simply not true. Their back and forth on the topic of her universal prowess has covered a lot of ground over the years, from the early days when it was more accusation than assertion on his part to the way it’s been these last few years, where he says it—he believes it—and she limits herself to a resigned shake of the head most of the time, because there’s no point in arguing with him. 

> _“You ever regret it?”_  
>  _— Richard Castle,_ Habeas Corpse _(7 x 19)_

* * *

She is _not_ good at everything, whatever he says. Whatever he has _always_ said, it’s simply not true. Their back and forth on the topic of her universal prowess has covered a lot of ground over the years, from the early days when it was more accusation than assertion on his part to the way it’s been these last few years, where he says it—he _believes_ it—and she limits herself to a resigned shake of the head most of the time, because there’s no point in arguing with him. 

Except lately, she wants to argue with him. Lately she feels like she should. Lately, she feels like she might, at any second, yell for him to shut his stupid face, because she is _not_ good at everything. She doesn’t yell, though, because for one thing, his face isn’t stupid. Or it _is_ stupid, it’s just also very sweet and she’s also stupidly in love with it. For another thing, she can’t imagine the shock it would be to him if she were to suddenly revert to the earliest of early days and embark on a litany of things she is not at all good at, just for the wrong-headed Brer Fox satisfaction of contradicting him. 

It would simply be too bizarre. It would invite far too many questions she is not interested in answering, so in the end, she probably won’t yell in his face. More importantly, she probably won’t just confess to this one specific thing that she is not good at. She probably won’t do the sensible, grown-up, obvious thing and tell him that she is not at all good at singing in front of people. 

She sits with that two-pronged reality: She is not good at singing in public, and she is not going to own up that. She doesn’t have much choice, _but_ to sit with it, given that she can’t sleep, she can’t eat, and it’s all she can really do to keep her mind on the case. And given the amount of back-and-forth trash-talking going on at the precinct, she doesn’t really even have the luxury of not having to sit with it at work. 

The situation gets desperate enough that she _does_ own up, to Martha at least. And as it turns out, she inadvertently owns up to him at the same time. Or maybe it’s not so inadvertent. Maybe it’s just … unconscious. She knows damned well that privacy in the loft—in so far as it exists at all—is a polite fiction they all mutually maintain. So maybe it doesn’t even qualify as unconscious. Maybe she _is_ just chicken. 

That’s what it comes down to. Or that’s at least what the crisis, made to order by her psyche, is swirling around: This is not a failure of ability. She’s _not_ good at everything, and she’s fine with that. She’s … _sort of_ fine with that. The truth of the matter is, she is not generally inclined to try things she might not be good at. She _is_ generally inclined to feign distaste or lack of interest in things she suspects she might not be good at. 

For most of her life, she has feigned lack of interest in singing in any capacity other than “along with the radio.” Until him—until the courage his sweet, stupid conviction that she is good at _everything_ —karaoke was utterly unthinkable, because what if she wasn’t good at it? What if people laughed or threw beer bottles or yawned or used a giant _Gong Show_ hook to pull her right off the stage. What if people actually _died_ because she was not good at it? 

But there’s him. There has been a _lot_ of karaoke, and she’s good at it. She has a better than average voice and the two of them together have stage presence. But she won’t—they won’t—in a non-karaoke context. She’s stupidly sure of it, and that’s what this comes down to: A failure of courage. 

There should be some heroic third act once she realizes this. There should be a montage, and some tissue-paper-thin reason why she and she alone must not only compete but win the competition to save the community center, the theater space, the neighborhood from the wrecking ball. She should pull a garment bag from the back of her unmarked the very second after they slap the cuffs on Archie Bronstein, and the two of them should race into the benefit just before Jimmy Kimmel is about to bestow the cup on the winner. 

But none of that happens, and she is fine with it. She is _better_ than fine with it, though she shrinks into herself when she has to face the fact that he knows this is a failure of courage. She has to deal with the heat in her cheeks and the strong, if fleeting, desire to dig a hole in the world and pull it in after herself, but she’ll take it. She’ll take his sweet declaration that it’s not stupid, just human. 

  
In fact, that gives her an idea, and a very good one at that. She _is_ human. She isn’t good at everything. But she happens to be _great_ at a number of things—practically superhuman, in fact—and tonight is a great time to remind him of that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is all a lie. Beckett is good at all things. It’s not a thing that there’s a thing she is not good at. Once again: Not a thing. 


End file.
